Where There's a Will

“And I probably should look at the autopsy report itself, even if you think it’s suspect. The coroner might have noticed something helpful.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.” He stood up and poured most of his coffee into the sink. “Look, I have to run into Kona for a while, but I’ll set you guys up in a quiet room and have Sarah bring it all over to you.”

“How about sending the whole case file while you’re at it?” John said. “I wouldn’t mind looking through it.”

“You’re talking about a lot of paper.”

John shrugged. “It’ll give me something to do.”

“Okay, but I can’t let you guys take anything away with you, you understand that. It all has to stay here.”

“No problem,” John said.

Fifteen minutes later, with Gideon and John deposited in a pleasant conference room with comfortable faux- leather chairs, a dark, gleaming table, and windows whose views artfully managed to avoid the compost heaps and wrecked cars, instead looking over the lava fields, past the Boeing 717s floating down to the nearby airport, and onto the massive, cloud-wreathed hump that was Maui, an affable, carrot-topped clerk lugged in a rolling cart bulging with hanging folders and set it next to the table, between their chairs. A thick, yellow nine-by-twelve clasp envelope was plopped on the table as well.

“There you are, boys. The case file’s in the folders. The envelope has the crime scene photos. If you need anything else, pick up that phone and dial forty-four. I’m Sarah Andersen.”

“Is the autopsy report in with the case file?” Gideon asked.

“No, it wouldn’t be in there. His Majesty didn’t tell me you wanted it. Be back in a sec.”

In the envelope was a stack of black-and-white eight-byten photos and a neatly printed log numbering and describing them; a hundred and sixty-five in all, as usual starting with the exterior of the building and working inward, gradually going from long-and intermediate-range shots to close-ups. Gideon was at the hundred and thirtieth before he got to the first relatively close full-length image of the body, which had been found lying half on its side, half on its face.

It made him close his eyes.

ELEVEN

BONESwere one thing: smooth, clean, ivory-colored, usually suggesting little that brought one up against agony or violent death. A nick here, a tidy, round hole there, a few harmless-looking cracks. Even when there was more extensive breakage bone seemed to have more in common with broken pottery than with bloody, broken heads and spilled brains. His most timid, queasy students had no trouble glueing together a shattered skull or a crushed pelvis. But horribly maimed bodies like this one... crispy critters, his colleagues called the burned ones, and while Gideon had no quarrel with the use of black humor to distance oneself from horror, for him it didn’t work. Neither did anything else.

“Here’s a picture of him,” he said, sliding it over to John, who had been browsing through the case file.

John put down an open folder. “Jesus, is that after or before they cremated him?”

On the other hand, he had to admit that sometimes black humor did help, and he was grateful for the opportunity to smile. “Before. But you’re right, he was pretty well charred, especially the upper body. Externally, he’s pretty well carbonized from the chest up. Not quite as bad below.”

“Is there one of him face-up? They must have flipped him over.”

Gideon paged through a few more photos. “Yes, here.”

Both men leaned closer to look at it. “Ugh. You can see why they wouldn’t have known who it was from the face,” Gideon said.

“Face, what face? His head looks like a...like a lump of coal, like a...I mean, where are the eyes, where’s the nose?”

Gideon nodded. “Notice the damage is so much more pronounced around the head and shoulders. Interesting.”

“I can tell you why that is,” John said. “I just read the arson investigator’s report. There’s no question at all about it being arson, by the way. They found traces of two different accelerants—paint thinner and diesel fuel oil— and at least five different origin points in the building, one of which was him.”

“Him? You mean they set him on fire?”

“Yeah, pretty much. His face was resting right on a roll of straw matting that’d been soaked in diesel oil.”

Gideon looked at the photographs. “Yes, I guess maybe you can see a few burned chunks of matting—of something, anyway—on the floor there.”

There were six pictures of the body in all, and Gideon fanned them out so they could both look at them. From the chest up, it was barely identifiable as a human form, more like a black, barely started sculpture than the remains of flesh and bone and muscle. Below the chest, the form was recognizably human, but made of charred, piebald skin, split in places like a sausage left too long on the grill. The clothing had been completely burned away except for the residue of a wide belt at the waist—or perhaps it was just the impression the burning belt had left on the burning skin— and the coalesced remnants of cowboy boots on the feet.

“John, I can’t tell anything from this. There’s just nothing distinctive, nothing to say if it’s Magnus or it isn’t Magnus. It’s human, that’s about it. And obviously, the toes aren’t visible. I just hope there’s something more in the autopsy report.”

“Well, I can tell you who Torkel wanted everyone to think it was: himself— Torkel.”

“Sure, but we already figured that out.”

“We thought that. We assumed that. But now there’s proof. Torkel took off his own ring and put it on Magnus’s body.” He leafed through one of the folders until he came to what he wanted. “Here. ‘Also under the decedent’s right hand was a signet ring made of white gold or similar